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GUIDeHOW TO make DUBSTeP

HOUSe, DnB, HiP HOP POP aND mORe!

Expert tutorials show you how to make today’s top dance styles

Includes downloadable audio program files and samples

Lessons for every major music software, plug-in and synth!

From thE makErs oF

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The ultimate all-in-one guide to making today’s tracks Make House, Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Hip Hop, Chillout, Pop, Trance AND MORE

4 / MAKE DANCE MUSIC

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06 DrUM & bASS Create bang up-to-date DnB tracks with our massive guide, featuring four huge producers, hours of video and easy-to-follow walkthroughs

18 DUbStEp VS Dnb The UK’s two biggest, baddest electronic styles are hotbeds of innovative production technique, and now the lines between them are blurring

66 HIp-Hop Lay down a phat, fresh beat and inspire your MC to new heights as we explore every element of hip-hop instrumental production

70 CHECK tHE tECHNIqUE If you’re looking to blast head-first into hip-hop, we’ll get you started: learn how to sample, build beats, program bass sounds and more

138 HoW to MAKE A HIt Want to know the secret to commercial success? We bring together some of the biggest names in production today to find out what goes into making tracks destined for the charts

150 tHIS IS tHE rEMIX Learn how to analyse a track, take it apart and transform it from one dance genre to another with our comprehensive step-by-step guide to the art of remixing

Drum & Bass

Hip-Hop

110 tHE ULtIMAtE GUIDE to pop proDUCtIoN We talk to top producers Future Cut, examine the numbers and walk through the mechanics of writing the perfect pop song

124 tHE ULtIMAtE GUIDE to CHILLoUt With summer quietly sneaking out the back door let’s take a look back and learn the production techniques behind this most enduring and universal of modern genres. Our laid-back tips will get you on the right track

Pop

Chillout

The Knowledge

34 DUbStEp From the underground to the mainstream, dubstep is a global phenomenon. In this in-depth guide, we reveal its techniques

51 IN DEEp WItH DUbStEp This beats and bass urban genre is now highly visible on the mainstream radar. Here’s how to craft the new commercial sound of today’s smash hit dubstep tracks

86 tHE ESSENtIAL GUIDE to HoUSE Get the sound of Swedish House Mafia and their peers, as we show you how to build a complete house track, from initial sound selection all the way through to mixing and mastering

99 CUttING-EDGE HoUSE Walkthroughs, tips and production tricks abound in our comprehensive guide to making cutting-edge house tracks

Dubstep

House

The ultimate all-in-one guide to making today’s tracks Make House, Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Hip Hop, Chillout, Pop, Trance AND MORE

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HBZ22.t_dubstepvsdnb.indd 20 9/4/13 12:14 PM

Dubstep and drum ’n’ bass are two of the UK’s most exciting and

boundary-pushing musical genres. Both are also hugely popular among readers, thanks to their heavily software-based approaches and relative accessibility from a production point of view.

Of late, the relationship between DnB and dubstep has become symbiotic, to the extent that sounds, rhythms and ideas can be heard moving freely from one to the other and back. While many now take this musical cross-pollination for granted, only a few short years ago the two styles had little in common beyond a shared ancestry of techno, hip-hop, dub and house.

Nowadays, the success of artists like Chase & Status and Nero – who flit between genres at the drop of a hat – has inspired many producers to experiment freely with both drum ’n’ bass and dubstep, from tear-out merchants like Original Sin to more minimal producers such as Alix

Perez. As a result of this, a hybrid style called – predictably but effectively – drumstep has emerged, taking dubstep’s half-time beats and upping the tempo from 140 to 170bpm.

Even the lines between dubstep and the more bass-driven forms of house are now becoming increasingly indistinct, with artists like Foamo, Jack Beats and Black Noise incorporating DnB and dubstep sounds into

their four-to-the-floor productions.With genre-defining boundaries fast

evaporating, it’s a very exciting time to be making dance music. In this star-studded guide to DnB and dubstep in 2010/11, five of the scenes’ leading lights share some of their most closely guarded production secrets with us, including a deconstruction of Reso’s massive drumstep anthem War Machine, a breakdown of how The Qemists created the dubstep remix of their track Renegade, Icicle’s guide to creating beats and bass, further massive (and, indeed, Massive) bassline action from High Rankin, and a look at how Cutline process their drums to get those big dubstep and DnB beats.

But that’s really only the tip of the iceberg. In our download you can see and hear three of our five featured artists put their words into action, in three hours of exclusive video masterclasses. So fire up that DAW and let’s begin our journey into the deepest bass known to man…

The UK’s two biggest, baddest electronic styles are hotbeds of innovative production technique, and now the lines between them are blurring. We infiltrate the studios of five of today’s most influential artists for the ultimate genre-bending masterclass

“With genre-defining boundaries fast

evaporating, it’s an exciting time to be

making dance music”

MAKE DANCE MUSIC / 21

HBZ22.t_dubstepvsdnb.indd 21 9/4/13 12:14 PM

POWER TIP

>Sample it firstOne way to enhance the sound of your drums is to sample the individual hits and trigger them from a sampler instead of directly from the drum machine. This way, you can reduce the release times so that each hit ends as soon as the note is released, giving you the ability to draw in long or short notes without a thought to messy overlaps. Further, you can pitch and filter the sounds to better suit your mix. Typically the extended kick of an 808 will be tuned to the root note of the track.


> Step by step Making an 808 beat with Roland emulation D16 Nepheton

Let’s not beat about the bush here: hip-hop owes much of its DNA to

Roland’s classic TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine. Throughout hip-hop history and into the present day, this machine has been the genre’s bread and butter for percussion. D16 Group’s Nepheton (www.d16.pl) is a stunningly accurate emulation that even reproduces some of the very subtlest nuances.

1Nepheton goes so far as to emulate Roland’s classic sequencer, but we

also have the choice to use our host’s sequencer instead. Unless you’re going for strict old-school authenticity, the sequencer of any modern DAW has many advantages over the old 808 version, such as easy velocity ramps. So, we deactivate Nepheton’s internal sequencer and set Cubase’s Tempo to 148bpm.

2Hip-hop typically requires a steady, repetitive rhythm that works as a

canvas to the rhythmical interplay of the lyricist. If you’re unsure of where to begin constructing your drum rhythm, put the kick and clap on beats 1 and 3 respectively. This creates a simple half-time step that’s a great foundation for something a whole lot funkier…

3

To spice up the rhythm, move every other kick a beat early, then add a

third kick two beats later, creating a two-bar pattern. Now to add the final essential ingredient to any hip-hop beat; the hi hats. Even with the kick and clap on a half-speed groove, the hats sound good on eighth-notes, with the occasional 16th-note.

4Finally, we tweak and mix the drum pads in Nepheton. This is the stage

where you can adjust the sounds to fit the mix you’re working on, but you can copy our settings for the hand clap and closed hi-hat (pictured) for now. Most importantly, the kick’s Decay and Level are maxed out and the Tone knob is at the minimal value, producing a deep, resonant, booming kick. (Audio in the download: 808Beat.wav.)

5

Getting started should be fairly straightforward. Hip-hop productions are often minimalistic, and even most of those that aren’t likely started life as a simple drum loop. This is the foundation upon which all else is built. Note also that if the drum/percussion track has enough sub bass, you don’t also need to add a separate bassline.

These kinds of decisions will vary greatly depending on what type of beat you’re going for. Hip-hop has a diverse and rich array of sub-genres, so gathering a set of reference tracks should help to inspire you. It will also provide some clues as to the production techniques you could be using. The devil is in the details; for example, listen for whether a kick or a snare is used, or whether both are layered together. Notice how fills and pauses in the rhythm are used to dramatic effect, and keep an ear on the interplay of these effects with the lyrical content.

These days, clubby sounds are trending. There’s a lot of influence on the charts from European dance genres, with hard, processed kick drums, soaring trance leads and filthy dubstep wobbles all putting in an appearance. When these influences are plonked into the melting pot with authentic hip-hop beats, the result is a fresh sound that reeks of 2012.

You might think of it as commercialism, but art always cross pollinates with other art to create something new. Hip-hop music in particular has never been afraid to mix with just about any other genre out there. If you don’t like it, then find plenty of examples of what you do like and draw from those influences instead.

Whether you’re intending to go wild with experimentation or you just want to make an authentic old-skool track, the best place to start is with building your rhythm track…

Be inspired, then create

B.o.B’s sound incorporates many dance-style sounds

video tutorial

HBZ22.t_hiphop1.indd 68 9/4/13 12:18 PM


> Step by step Sampling drum patterns to create classic lo-fi beats

One of the staples of hip-hop music is the use of crusty old vinyl samples

and particularly breakbeats. We’re going to sidestep the legally dubious process of sampling by producing our own drum beat with XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums (www.xlnaudio.com). Load the software up – it’ll be ready to play the Startup Beat with the Startup Kit.

1The beat is already similar to something a hip-hop producer might sample. The

first thing we do is change the kit to the crustier Disco Fever setup. Now we move down to the mixer, moving the HiHat pan position to 0, deactivating INS to soften the sound and then activating FX to help it blend with the other sounds. To thicken things up, we lift the Room level up to 0dB.

2We drag the Startup Beat from the Beats page and drop it on to Addictive

Drums’ MIDI track so that we can edit it. With our Tempo now set to 100bpm, we like the groove of the tenth bar looped. We mute the crash, cow bell and tom because we feel that they’d get annoying if looped constantly throughout a track.

3

We boost Addictive Drums’ output by 10dB and export the bar in question to

be re-imported as an audio file for slicing. We begin surgery by replacing beat 4 with a copy of beat 2. After this, we copy the kick from before the second snare and put one before the first snare and one at the end of the bar. (File in the download: AD Drums Funky Beat.wav.)

4To clean up the beat further, we use Cubase’s Gate effect, which silences

any parts of the signal below a certain level. With Analysis set to 0 (peak mode), Threshold at -24dB, Attack at 0.1, Hold at 0 and Release at 30, it sounds great. We tweak further by turning down the loud hats in beat 3 and the small kicks we copied in the previous step. Fade the kicks and snares as shown above.

5When it sounds tight, export the results from the previous step. (File:

AD Drums Funky Beat Gated.wav.) Next we load it into 112dB’s Morgana, which has a modest, lo-fi sound (www.112db.com). Set Osc Mix to 0.00, notice that the Root Note is 066 (F#3) and trigger this on every bar in the sequencer to loop the beat.

6

Now we bring D16 Group’s Nepheton into the mix to add a more electronic

vibe and extend the frequency range. Write in hi-hats, kick and snare in obvious places. They don’t necessarily have to match up identically with the sampled drum beat – the pattern shown above works well for us. Increase the kick Level and Decay, but decrease its Tone.

7We can clean up the Morgana output further with another Gate. We use

mostly the same settings as before, but this time with a Threshold of -30dB to remove unwanted crunch between hits. This kills the ambience, so we use ValhallaRoom to provide a reverb (www.valhalladsp.com). From its default state, set Mix to 10% and Decay to 0.25s.

8Finally, we EQ the Morgana output to help it fit with Nepheton’s 808 sounds.

Boost 66Hz by about 20dB to enhance the deep thud on the kick, but set the Q to around 2.5 (thin enough so that the boost doesn’t interfere with the snare). Next we cut 348Hz by 6dB to sweeten the tone and create space. (File: Oldskool Beat.wav.)

9

HBZ22.t_hiphop1.indd 69 9/4/13 12:18 PM

If there’s one thing at which the music press excel it’s

premature epitaphs. Five years ago, many journalists were poised to hammer the last nail into the coffin of house music. Bands were back in vogue and pop was the hot musical currency on radio and TV. It was a similar story towards the end of the previous decade, but once again rumours of dance music’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Today, everybody from Rhianna to Beyoncé is lining up to get a piece of the new house sound. From clubs to pubs and beaches to bars, all across the world, hitherto unknown underground names like David Guetta and Swedish House Mafia are loudly trumpeted.

Now, we’re not going to get sucked into a pointless debate on the pros and cons of the fresh fame of house – like it or not, the tracks you hear in the clubs are once again riding high in the charts, just as they were at the turn of the 90s and again in the 00s. There’s just something about house music and new decades!

Nor are we going to worry too much about the excessive sub-

genre madness of years gone by. House, techno, hip-hop and all other modern forms of music are born from a blend of technology, evolution and musical husbandry, so the more influences the merrier. And, thankfully, it’s finally becoming acceptable once again for house producers to move outside the constraints of their ‘tech’, ‘electro’, ‘progressive’ and other restrictive qualifiers. In

honour of this, we’re going to borrow from tribal, progressive, trance, epic and plenty in between. And how better to do that than to set about making a track inspired by the big, bold, clean sound of Swedish House Mafia and Guetta? It works in the clubs yet sounds like a million bucks. Here’s how it’s done…

“We’re going to borrow from tribal, progressive, trance, epic and plenty in between”

Get the sound of Swedish House Mafia and their peers, as we show you how to build a complete house track, from initial sound selection all the way through to mixing and mastering

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HBZ22.t_house1.indd 86 9/4/13 12:24 PM

POWER TIP

>House beatsThere’s no real rule as to what constitutes a house beat, and we’re not sure there ever has been. Traditionally, you’d imagine an electronic kick drum on all four beats with an off-beat hat, but not only does that include about 90% of disco, it also excludes a lot of modern house. Today, you might find breaks, or you might not. You might find lots of syncopated electronic percussion, or you might just find a kick and some noises. The House Mafia sound tends to be quite simple and clean, so that’s what we’re going for here. Don’t shy away from chucking in some additional percussion, though – just make sure it suits the music.


the essential guide to house / make music now <

> Step by step Getting started with the drums

Start by opening up a new project in your DAW – we’re using Logic. We

use a saved template that includes a good selection of groove-mapped vintage drum machine quantise templates. Most DAWs these days offer such templates or groove maps, but if yours doesn’t, don’t panic – they don’t do anything you can’t do by hand.

1The majority of dance producers start by writing a basic beat. There’s nothing

stopping you laying down a riff first, but we find a phat kick drum more inspirational to play with than a relentless metronome. We start with a quality kick drum sample – No kicking no biting.wav from 154’s Carnival Rave collection – and sequence it to play on every beat of the bar.

2Set your beat to loop over four bars (more on that later). Now, it’s time to

start tidying up the kick drum. Ours currently has some quite wide stereo upper frequencies, like those you might expect to get when sampling a kick from another track. We apply a low-pass filter in the EXS24 sampler and lower the Cutoff until that wide tail is inaudible.

3

Next, we route the Cutoff frequency to an envelope and set the controls to

allow a little bit of the kick’s transient snap through, making sure that some of the width of the kick is retained. This is in keeping with the big, wide, polished sound of the new school of international house.

4Claps next, and we choose a straight homage to classic house (and SHM) –

a 909-style clap courtesy of Rob Papen’s Punch drum machine. We place it on every beat of the bar and add the largest, widest and most expensive-sounding reverb patch we can find. This is what makes these very well-known sounds appear fresh (the same technique works for 808 and 606 sounds in modern R&B).

5

Continuing this classic (and Swedish) theme, we tap out a little rolling snare

pattern. The snare is a 909-style affair from Sonic Charge MicroTonic 3, and we play it in live on a drum pad. It’s important to do this, as even if you quantise the timing (which we do – using the template MPC3K 16, Swing 57%), valuable ‘human’ velocity information will be retained.

6Hi-hats now, and we’re eschewing the standard off-beat hat completely. We

want something bright and clear – more tinkle than crash – as that allows heavier reverb, better atmosphere and more space for other sounds in the mix. We opt for a synthesised sound, firing up Sonic Charge MicroTonic 3 again and scrolling through some of the hi-hat presets, eventually going for NE CH Drain*.

7With our basic hi-hat chosen, we tap out a funky riff that varies over two

bars. With the pattern in place, we can adjust the envelope on the hi-hat to suit it. We also double up the hi-hat channel, select a second MicroTonic 3 hi-hat that we like and sculpt the envelope so that it’s a little shorter than the first.

8

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110 / MAKE DANCE MUSIC110 110 110 110 // MAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSICMAKE DANCE MUSIC

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

HBZ22.t_pop.indd 110 9/4/13 12:21 PM

Working in the pop industry doesn’t mean selling your soul, and it can be pretty

lucrative too. We talk to top producers Future Cut,

examine the numbers and walk through the mechanics

of writing the perfect pop song

Let’s start by discussing what we mean by pop music in the context of this guide,

since the name means different things to different people. It started out as a simple abbreviation for popular music, but now the term is generally accepted as a description of a genre in its own right.

Some would argue that whatever is in the Top Forty at any given time defines what pop music is at that point. But if a fidget house track were to reach Number One, that wouldn’t mean that suddenly all other fidget house tracks were automatically classified as pop music.

In general, the genre now referred to as pop music is very much youth-oriented. Tracks are simple and fairly short, with catchy vocals, a clear verse/chorus structure and easy harmonies. Many have absorbed characteristics from other easily accessible genres, such as R&B and rock. Think JLS, Katy Perry, Girls Aloud and Will Young.

The charts are supposed to be a representation of what’s popular, and most people would at least agree that pop music is

the sound that dominates the charts at any given time. By that definition, pop music is an important element of modern culture. It’s all over the media and thus considered the default in terms of commercial music.

Unsurprisingly, then, pop music is often associated with major record labels and huge sums of money. Just how lucrative the pop industry is these days is a subject of debate, but nonetheless it continues to attract those who are in it for the money as well as those who genuinely love the music itself.

Sometimes a track that wasn’t intended to be categorised as pop music will chart. This happens because the ingredients that come together to create a hit record are so volatile and mysterious, nobody can claim to definitively know what they are or how to distill them.

We’re going to take a comprehensive look into the world of pop music from the computer musician’s perspective. So no matter what style you usually work in, keep an open mind and be prepared to learn more than you might expect.



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HBZ22.t_pop.indd 111 9/4/13 12:21 PM

Want to know the secret to commercial success? We bring together some of the biggest names in pop production

today to find out exactly what goes into making tracks destined for the charts



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138 / MaKE danCE MUSIC

hit!How to make a

The screenshots used in the walkthroughs have been captured by us for demonstration purposes, rather than being made by our featured artists. Thus, they don’t necessarily represent the actual software those artists use

HBZ22.t_hit.indd 138 9/4/13 12:24 PM

You wont have been able to avoid hearing how hard it is to make a living from music these days,

what with the ‘state of the record industry’ and the depressing downward trend in sales. That doesn’t mean we have to stop trying, though – until we see Simon Cowell down the job centre or up the bookies, we reckon it’s still worth a stab.

There are still plenty of ways to make an honest living from music: gigs, merchandise and licensing are options open to us all. But what if you’re not the patient type, or you won’t settle for anything less than the full yacht-in-Cannes A-list lifestyle? In that case, there’s pretty much only one course of action open to you: you’re going to need to produce a hit.

So, now that we have our foolproof plan sorted, how do we get started? Unfortunately, the bad news is that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. That’s why we’ve put this feature together! Over the next 11 pages, you’re going to learn the secrets of ‘hit production’ from a whole range of people who know all about it. From mix engineers and songwriters to remixers and producers, every one of our featured artists knows what it takes to make a hit, each having at least one Top Ten track under their belt.

What makes a hit?Before we tackle this elusive question, let’s go for something far easier to answer – what is a hit? A reasonable answer might be any song that makes it into the Top 40, or, more specifically, the Top 10. Crude as it may be to quantify the success of a song this way, we’re not suggesting that by necessity ‘hit’ equals ‘good’ (think Crazy Frog), or that ‘good’ equals ‘hit’ (your favourite unknown indie band).

What actually transforms a track into a hit is a much thornier issue. Is it the hook line? The vocal? And what about the marketing, the PR, or radio play – don’t all these factors play a part too? You only need to think of the countless covers that charted higher than the originals to realise that it isn’t just about the song itself – Frankie Valli only made it to Number 32 with Beggin’, while Madcon took it to Number 5.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty you can do to make your productions more hit-viable, though. In fact, the record industry has already made the basics readily identifiable. Just listen to any track in the charts today and see if you can find one that’s more that five minutes long. Then try and find one without a lyric of some kind. You might weed out a couple, but you’ll soon realise that they’re a definite minority.

Dissecting the characteristics of hit songs is certainly a good starting point, and helpfully, two enterprising students – Tom Engelhardt and Shaun Ellis – have already done most of the hard work for you at www.bit.ly/olQ7CG. In their project Visualising a Hit, the duo set out to visualise US Billboard Chart data over the last half century in a way that might reveal the hidden pop ‘formula’. The short answer is that they couldn’t do it – but that isn’t to say that they didn’t reveal some noteworthy trends that could help you in your quest for chartdom.

If you want hard numbers, remember 119.8bpm. That is apparently the golden tempo if your want your track to be a hit. Less tangible but no less intriguing is the upward trend in ‘danceability’ (which covers things like beat strength, tempo stability, overall tempo). Recent years have also seen an increase in track length (though this seems to be more variable) and – you won’t be surprised to learn – volume.

That perfect progressionFactors such as tempo, track length and danceability are within our control, but what about making those all-important catchy riffs? Musicians recognised long ago that certain chord progressions just ‘work’, and consequently, they seem to crop up time and time again. As clever and as individual as we might like to think we are, deep down we’re all suckers for a classic.

Let’s take a minor diversion into the world of music theory. Essentially, the area we’re concerned with here is chord progressions. One popular chord progression is 1, 5, 6, 4 – usually represented in roman numerals as I-V-vi-IV (uppercase for major, lowercase for minor, with the numbers representing the intervals – first, fifth, minor sixth, perfect fourth). If your track is in C major, you’d end up with these chords: C, G, A minor and F. Stick that progression into your DAW, assign it to a piano sound and you might hear Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing. Search YouTube for ‘One chord progression to rule them all’ to see many more. To help you work out intervals, www.musictheory.net has a handy calculator. There are forums and blog posts all over the net stuffed with perceived popular progressions and in-depth discussion on the topic, should you wish to investigate further.

Ultimately, we all know what makes a hit: it’s something catchy, something simple, something we can sing along to, and something that just ‘feels’ right. And therein lies the problem – usually we only know what that something is when we stumble upon it.

Musicians, DJs and engineers alike have all been complaining in recent years about the steady upward climb in music volume. New technology, digital radio, crystal clear sound systems and a savage battle for our listening attention have conspired to make music much louder today than it’s ever been before.

What’s wrong with that? The main problem is that by making something louder, you’re sacrificing its dynamics. Later on in this feature we meet mix engineer James Reynolds, who gives us some tips on retaining

dynamics in our productions; but the problem remains that unless everyone agrees to start lowering the dB a little bit, we’re at risk of painting ourselves into a volume corner.

Have you ever noticed how pop songs seem to somehow lift in the chorus, peaking in energy? That’s dynamics at work. Mix engineers leave some headroom in the overall mix so that they’re able to raise the volume at the chorus. This gentle but definite rise can give your choruses a dose of vital energy that can really make all the difference.

The important thing is to remember that volume might have impact, but stay too loud for too long and the ear will start to tire. With the average volume for chart hits hovering at around -6dB, go gentle with the master fader, only compress the master bus if you need to, and do everything you can to add some dynamic range. Not only will you be rewarded with a better-sounding song in general, you’ll also get some of that magical X-Factor ‘feeling’. You may lose the loudness battle, but you’ll definitely be winning the war.

Once more, with feeling

MaKE danCE MUSIC / 139

how to make a hit / make music now <

HBZ22.t_hit.indd 139 9/4/13 12:24 PM

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